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ASHBURN, Va. — In 1928, Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria in a London lab and wound up discovering penicillin. In 1938, DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was experimenting with gas in a New Jersey lab when he stumbled upon Teflon.
And in 2026, Dan Quinn and the Washington Commanders’ coaching staff were watching video footage from a GoPro affixed to Jayden Daniels’ helmet, hoping to see how he went through his progressions, when they found something else. The breakthrough came when they realized it wasn’t what they were watching during each dropback, it was what they were hearing between each play: a leader, dropped into a new environment, completely at ease.
“One of the unintended good consequences was the audio,” Quinn tells The Athletic of his happy accident. “And so I was expecting (the camera) to be just for the first look and second look, but what was there was in the huddle, the sound of it. I thought that was pretty cool.
“He was always so calm and cool, and he’s still that way in the huddle. … That’s a big deal. There’s a calmness when the quarterback, in the chaos, is like, ‘We’re good, man.’”
The Commanders are trying out this new thing called “the huddle.” Pretty new, at least, for their third-year quarterback, who has huddled far less than any other starter since he entered the league.
In many ways, the huddle is going to be the powerhouse of these Commanders. It’s one aspect of a new offensive approach, one the team believes will allow Daniels to use his leadership, exercise his vast football IQ and even protect him from taking as many hits as he has in the past.
Though first, Daniels has to figure out how to huddle.
Last season the median NFL offense huddled about 82 percent of the time. When Daniels was on the field, the Commanders huddled about 32 percent of the time. If you remove the first play of the drive (when almost every team huddles), that number plummets to 20 percent. Taking away huddles after timeouts or penalties would drop it even more. For all intents and purposes, Daniels has never huddled play-to-play in his pro career.
Kliff Kingsbury’s offense the last two seasons didn’t require it, but Daniels also didn’t do it in college. Without a huddle, there is less information a quarterback can communicate to the other 10 players.
That lends itself to a less complex offense, one that’s easier for defenses to decipher. Tempo typically offsets some of that. Even if you have a simpler offense, going quickly can create an edge. Instead, the Commanders self-neutralized their inherent advantage. Last year, on average, there were 9.6 seconds remaining on the playclock when the Commanders snapped the ball, eighth-highest in the NFL and much closer to the league average (9 seconds) than the Dallas Cowboys’ league-leading 12 seconds.
Not huddling, coupled with not going quickly, also meant the offense would unnecessarily burn timeouts. Last year, Washington led the league with 10 games in which it used at least two timeouts before the final three minutes of either half.
This season, communication will be much different than it was in Daniels’ first two NFL seasons. (Peter Casey / Imagn Images)
On the coaching side, the keys to the offense have now been turned over to 31-year-old David Blough, a first-time offensive coordinator who can use the huddle to get more information to Daniels and get everyone on the same page.
“It sounds like no big deal, but it’s a big deal,” Quinn says. “Like, ‘Hey, be ready. I’m coming to you if it’s zone.’ It’s cues, it’s information. Letting the players know, ‘Let’s be quick. Let’s get on the ball.’”
With one training camp and three preseason snaps in the books, Daniels hasn’t decided on whether to stand up, hunch over or take a knee.
“It might depend,” Daniels tells The Athletic. “I might get down on a knee. I tried it a little bit. I kind of like it. It’s easier for guys to hear me if I project up, so it’s still a process.”
From a stellar rookie campaign to a forgettable sophomore season, Daniels has admittedly not been a vocal leader. Even earlier this summer, when headlines out of Ashburn said Daniels had declared the Commanders “his team now,” he was responding in the affirmative to a question rather than standing at the podium making a declaration.
Future Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Wagner was the unquestioned leader of the team for Daniels’ first two seasons. Both men grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, and with Wagner’s 12-year NFL head start on Daniels, the quarterback was deferential to his elder.
But with Wagner and fellow veteran Zach Ertz no longer in Washington, the team clearly belongs to Daniels. This summer, he arranged for his teammates to join him at UCLA for voluntary work. Commanders GM Adam Peters, a Bruins alum himself, got Daniels in touch with the right people and let the young quarterback take it from there.
“Everybody leads in their own way. Some people who aren’t vocal will try to be vocal and it comes off unauthentic, and the guys see right through that,” Peters says. “But Jayden leads in his own way, and he’s grown and matured. His offseason program this year, that showed a lot of growth and maturity in terms of how dialed-in he was with his body and his throwing.
“He’s done it in his own way. I think that all those things have really evolved and matured. You’re seeing that out on the field and in a way he’s got a calm and kind of mastery of what he’s doing.”
The majority of NFL training camp practices are scripted. Each side of the ball focuses on certain aspects on a given day. Sometimes there is a competitive period reserved for “call-its,” when the coordinator dials up plays in real time to simulate game action, such as substitutions or communication with players and staff.
The Commanders’ offense had 62 reps in their second practice of training camp — 45 of them were call-its. This is how Blough learns on the job.
Undrafted out of Purdue in 2019, Blough spent five NFL seasons toggling between the active roster and practice squads in Detroit, Cleveland, Arizona and Minnesota. Three years ago, Blough was a practice-squad quarterback for the Lions.
This fall, he’ll be one of eight NFL offensive coordinators 35 years or younger. And he’s one of three — along with the Philadelphia Eagles’ Sean Mannion and the Denver Broncos’ Davis Webb — who will be calling an offense after being a backup quarterback less than four years ago. Much of this trio’s success (or failure) will determine whether this becomes a trend or ends quickly.
Blough’s position was vacant because Kingsbury’s offense got stale. Blough had been a quarterback for Kingsbury’s Arizona Cardinals, and he came with Kingsbury to Washington when Quinn got the head job. When Quinn relieved Kingsbury of his duties after the season, he knew he wanted to go with Blough, who was also being pursued by the Detroit Lions after their season without Ben Johnson.
A well-worn narrative to this point: Quinn likes to signal to his time with the Atlanta Falcons as the reason why he chose Blough over a more veteran candidate. Quinn had Mike McDaniel, Matt LaFleur and Mike LaFleur on his staff when Kyle Shanahan left to take the San Francisco 49ers head coaching job following the 2016 season. Rather than promoting internally for his next OC, he went outside the building (hiring Steve Sarkisian). The offense never found its rhythm.
Quinn wasn’t going to make the same mistake a decade later. His “intentional development” of Blough, as Blough calls it, began before he was even on staff. When Blough came in for a visit after his time on the Lions’ practice squad and his transition to coaching, Quinn told him his plan. In 2005, Quinn was a defensive line coach for Nick Saban’s Miami Dolphins staff when Jason Garrett had just finished his playing career and joined the team as the quarterbacks coach. Garrett became the Cowboys’ offensive coordinator two years later, and the head coach four years after that.
“There are certain people who have that ‘it’ factor. He does,” Quinn says. “And so the best way I can help support is to stress him out here at practice. I’m trying to do that every day, not just to the players, but to the staff as well.”
Just three years removed from his playing career, David Blough takes over as the Commanders’ offensive coordinator. (Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
Like anyone, Blough wants to be a combination of the best he’s seen and none of the worst. He played under Kingsbury, Johnson and Kevin O’Connell and practiced beside Matthew Stafford and Jared Goff. Quarterbacks coach D.J. Williams, the son of legendary Washington quarterback Doug Williams, was around late-career Drew Brees with the New Orleans Saints. Assistant QBs coach Danny Etling shared rooms with Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers during his playing days.
Those are the influences surrounding Daniels heading into a consequential third season.
“Our hope was that 10 years from now we built something so strong that whoever is coming here to coach Jayden is running Jayden’s offense,” Blough says. “It’s all built around this young man who’s the centerpiece of this organization. Tom Brady ran the same offense for 20 years. That was our goal. We don’t want him switching terminology and verbiage ever again.”
Don’t get it twisted: Blough hopes to be with Daniels for a long time. The two have grown close. Up until the last month of the season, Blough was the only NFL assistant QBs coach Daniels had known. When Tavita Pritchard left mid-season to become the head coach at Stanford, Quinn elevated Blough to interim QBs coach.
Daniels had just suffered his fourth separate injury in a season where he’d only appear in seven contests. Quinn had coaches’ families come to a walkthrough practice toward the end of the lost season, and Blough brought his wife, Melissa, and 2-year-old daughter to practice. It was there that Daniels presented the little girl with a blue stuffed animal from Build-A-Bear.
To Blough, it was a sign of Daniels’ thoughtfulness and maturity. He didn’t have to do that, but now his daughter will always have Blue Bear from Mr. Jayden.
“It was around the Christmas season. I wasn’t playing last year so I had more time on my hands,” Daniels says now. “There wasn’t a lot of joy within the season for me, but I couldn’t be The Grinch.”
Daniels’ 2025 season wasn’t stolen by a green, pot-bellied humanoid but instead by a series of ailments, some the result of violent hits. In Week 2, he sprained his left knee. A few weeks later he strained his hamstring. He suffered a gruesome dislocated elbow against the Seattle Seahawks in Week 9, returned a month later and then landed on it when trying to chase down an interception.
Daniels’ Heisman highlight reel from 2024 was otherworldly, but SEC defenders could have assembled their own reel of massive hits they laid on the quarterback. He eluded the big injury during his first NFL season, but couldn’t avoid it last year.
The edict for 2026 is clear: He must take fewer hits.
“Let’s say there will be less designed QB runs,” he says with a smile.
A dislocated left elbow in November was among four different injuries for Daniels last season. (Greg Fiume / Getty Images)
Commanders coaches know Daniels is going to run — they just don’t have to call it. Quinn estimates Daniels will have four or five rushing attempts off scrambles alone each game. Adding designed runs to that “is how you end up with 10,” Quinn says.
The league’s average quarterback scramble rate the past two seasons is 5.5 percent. Daniels sits atop the NFL at 13.8 percent, multiple percentage points ahead of runners-up like Justin Fields, Tyler Huntley and Drake Maye.
So Washington has to set up some guardrails. And this is the biggest reason why Daniels will be under center more often this year. Getting under center should, in theory, make defenses respect the play-action game more than shotgun, where sometimes defenders can see the entire exchange (or lack thereof). That will help Daniels as a passer, as defenses have to play the run more honestly, and help the run game be more explosive.
Just like the huddle, no team the last two seasons has been under center less often than the Commanders. Last year Washington was under center just 13.1 percent of the time, and that dropped to 5.8 percent when Daniels was on the field. The Cincinnati Bengals had the second-lowest percentage of plays under center (18.4).
It’s an adjustment for any quarterback to turn their back to the defense. And such a new commitment by a coaching staff requires confidence in the quarterback’s football IQ to execute it. That includes taking that final mental snapshot of the defense before turning his back.
“You gotta have a general idea, like, this is my key defender on this concept, this is what they could be in possibly,” Daniels says. “You’re not gonna have all the answers to the test, right? You don’t wanna go out there and chase ghosts. You still gotta react and play ball. You gotta do your pre-set process, you have to go through your rolodex and stuff that they could do from your film study.
“Those guys get paid money to get sacks and blitz and all that, so you have that half-second of, ‘Oh shoot, I don’t know what’s going on,’ type of moment. You might turn around and somebody might be right there. But the more you do it, the more you rep it, the more comfortable you get with it.”
In a perfect world, huddling and getting under center bring out only the best in Daniels and none of the worst. He can still dissect defenses from the pocket, still throw on the move and, of course, still tuck it and run.
Blough is in the Jayden Daniels business, and it’s his job to increase opportunity and lower risk everywhere he can.
“How do I just continue to increase the probability that we have success and that he’s staying safe, and we also maximize what he does really well,” Blough says. “There’s 14 teams that have to defend us, and as long as the doubt is still there, that he could always pull it in and go, they have to spend time on that as well.”
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